Arranging content
Summary:
It all happens in the Multidoc custom field
Important
While the following rules are quite simple, it is very important that you follow them exactly when managing your Multidoc collections. Invalid data in the Multidoc custom field will generally cause all Multidoc collections to revert to standard Txp behavior, with all Multidoc navigation tags producing blank output. Your website won’t (usually) explode, but review the Read me file if you haven’t already.
The rules
Not good salesmanship to start off with a warning, and I don’t want to scare you, but it is important that you apply these rules exactly.
- Every Txp article belonging to a Multidoc collection, other than the Start page itself, must be identified by exactly one other Txp article — its parent. An article may not belong to more than one collection.
- Articles are listed according to their link type, in the form LinkType ID ID, where LinkType is a single word and the IDs are Txp article IDs, listed in the order you want them to appear.
- An article may list more than one link type, separating each group of articles with a comma. For example: Section 24 25 26, TOC 27
That, in a nutshell, is how you manage a Multidoc collection. You must do exactly that, no more and no less.
Details
Usually your Multidoc fields will be as simple as the examples shown. The likely exception is the Start page of a large collection with complex structure. But even that is very manageable, because the Start page only needs to list its immediate children, e.g. primary Section or Chapter pages.
Here is the general rule for entering data. The Multidoc field takes a comma-separated list of document groups. Each group begins with the document type, and is followed by a list of article IDs. Within a group use spaces to separate items. You can use a space after the comma or not, as you prefer.
The Multidoc field for this article’s Start page is too long to see all at once in the little custom field input box, but if you could see the whole thing it would look something like this:
For another example, see the Easy document management overview.
Posted 2009-01-27 (modified 2009-04-02)
